--- M A R C U S   C A F A G ñA

She remembers a young white rat
lifted from a cage to a towel spread on a card table
in the kitchen, where her nine-year-old hands cupped ether
over the whiskered nose and mouth
until each tiny pink foot
hung limp upon its tendon.
In his Beatle bangs and scrubs, her older brother
imagined himself a doctor, smuggled rodents home
from his late shift at the lab.
The night he opened an incision
down the throat to the sternum,
she dabbed up blood and kept
their patient sedated as his pen knife
sawed the quivering 
cherry-shaped pituitary gland from its stalk
in the brain.  She remembers
wondering if he thought the rat,
like The Incredible Shrinking Man,
would disappear in his hands, but only blanched
when the ether wafted her nostrils,
the sewing needle's
haphazard tail
of thread through skin tugged the long wound shut.
How she marveled at her brother like a god 
as he peeled apart the fine albino fur
to expose a mosaic of red and blue organs
in translucent sacs, and there
between the lungs
in electric thump, the systole
and diastole of a frantic heart.